The Road to Firebug 1.4

Honza wrote a good introduction to the new activation model awhile back and you may find it useful to understand the differences between activation mechanisms in 1.3 and 1.4.

JJB writes: “Firebug 1.4 is a true community achievement. We have had contributions from many developers and a few designers, with additions both large and small.”

And it’s true. We’ve seen contributions from several new people over the past year and some long-standing issues fixed. Kevin Decker, creator of the nascent FireDiff extension for Firebug contributed a new multi-file search capability. Hans Hillen working with the Paciello Group has done a tremendous job of making the Firebug UI accessible to screen readers. He also added a new Customize (keyboard) Shortcuts preferences pane (available from the Firebug menu).

You should also see some new icons in the Windows version of Firebug. Austin Andrews (aka Templarian) in IRC modified some of the Silk icons from FamFamFam for inclusion in Firebug. Some improved debugger icons have made it into the Mac and Linux versions as well. We still need to do some tweaking of the Mac skin so, if you or anyone you know would like to help out, get in touch with us.

oh, and that “Off” label on the right of the panel is a temporary thing to introduce people upgrading from 1.3 to the new behavior of the panel control icons (minimize, detach and close/off).

Over the next week or so we’re going to be writing more about the new features in Firebug 1.4 and how to use them.

Hats off to the Firebug developers and to all the great testers and users who helped us through the alpha and beta stages. We couldn’t have done it without you.